A university investigation is looking into an accusation of parking ticket fraud, received through e-mail by President Alexander Gonzalez.

The anonymous e-mail accuses a University Transportation and Parking Service’s employee of placing his or her own parking citations on other vehicles.

A full investigation was underway Thursday, said Ronald Grant, associate vice president of Business Operations for the university.

The e-mailed complaint, which was also sent to The State Hornet, also alleges the following:

*The UTAPS employee commits this act of fraud on a regular basis.

*The employee had the citation in question erased from the system.

*UTAPS director Nancy Fox has done nothing about the situation.

“I would have to say, ‘no,’ that I haven’t received a complaint nor was I aware of this,” Fox said last Wednesday. “We don’t receive a large amount of complaints anyway and complaints for this semester have not been worse than any other.”

Fox also said that she did not have any personal knowledge of the issue until she learned from Grant that an investigation was to be conducted.

“I got the e-mail Tuesday after it was sent to the president,” said Grant. “We’ve got someone looking into it and I don’t want to say much more than that. The investigation is independent of both Nancy (Fox) and I because we are involved in the operation of UTAPS.”

Grant is holding off on disclosing the names of the individuals involved in the university’s investigation into the allegation.

“I prefer not to disclose that at this time,” he said. “I want them to do their work and make as little publicity as possible during the investigation. But it’s a group you would be happy with.”

One student on campus wasn’t convinced that such an alleged scam could even work.

“You would have to be pretty stupid to fall for that,” said graduate student Joseph Hernandez. “Your license number and everything is right there on the ticket.”

Senior Gina Pitts uses all the parking spaces on campus and said she was disappointed to hear what may be occurring with ticketing.”I park on campus a lot,” said Pitts, a photography major. “I park in the garage, all over campus and in the 15 minute parking to drop things off. I haven’t gotten any tickets like that and I don’t know of anybody that has, but that’s not good.”

The investigation should be completed by Friday, and if found to be criminal in nature the information would be released at that time, Grant said. The names of those who completed the investigation will also be available.

Lora Simmons can be reached at [email protected]